DROP: Poison Dilution via Knowledge Distillation for Federated Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Syros, Georgios, Suri, Anshuman, Koushanfar, Farinaz, Nita-Rotaru, Cristina, Oprea, Alina
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Syros, Georgios
Suri, Anshuman
Koushanfar, Farinaz
Nita-Rotaru, Cristina
Oprea, Alina
author_facet Syros, Georgios
Suri, Anshuman
Koushanfar, Farinaz
Nita-Rotaru, Cristina
Oprea, Alina
contents Federated Learning is vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, where malicious clients can inject poisoned updates to influence the global model's behavior. While existing defense mechanisms have made notable progress, they fail to protect against adversaries that aim to induce targeted backdoors under different learning and attack configurations. To address this limitation, we introduce DROP (Distillation-based Reduction Of Poisoning), a novel defense mechanism that combines clustering and activity-tracking techniques with extraction of benign behavior from clients via knowledge distillation to tackle stealthy adversaries that manipulate low data poisoning rates and diverse malicious client ratios within the federation. Through extensive experimentation, our approach demonstrates superior robustness compared to existing defenses across a wide range of learning configurations. Finally, we evaluate existing defenses and our method under the challenging setting of non-IID client data distribution and highlight the challenges of designing a resilient FL defense in this setting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_07011
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DROP: Poison Dilution via Knowledge Distillation for Federated Learning
Syros, Georgios
Suri, Anshuman
Koushanfar, Farinaz
Nita-Rotaru, Cristina
Oprea, Alina
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Federated Learning is vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, where malicious clients can inject poisoned updates to influence the global model's behavior. While existing defense mechanisms have made notable progress, they fail to protect against adversaries that aim to induce targeted backdoors under different learning and attack configurations. To address this limitation, we introduce DROP (Distillation-based Reduction Of Poisoning), a novel defense mechanism that combines clustering and activity-tracking techniques with extraction of benign behavior from clients via knowledge distillation to tackle stealthy adversaries that manipulate low data poisoning rates and diverse malicious client ratios within the federation. Through extensive experimentation, our approach demonstrates superior robustness compared to existing defenses across a wide range of learning configurations. Finally, we evaluate existing defenses and our method under the challenging setting of non-IID client data distribution and highlight the challenges of designing a resilient FL defense in this setting.
title DROP: Poison Dilution via Knowledge Distillation for Federated Learning
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07011